For many new authors breaking into the publishing world and getting readers to buy their work is often more challenging than writing the book. Here's where the Guardian, the UK media company, comes in. "Guardian first book award", an annual competition founded by the media company in 1965 for best new writing in fiction and non fiction is still going strong. Winners of the award include writers such as Suketu Mehta, author of "Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found," Yiyun Li, author of "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers", and Amy Waldman who was one of the winners last year for her book "The Submission."
The competition is open for nominations for another week and the Guardian is calling on readers to nominate their favorite book by a 2012 new author. But the book must have been published in the UK this year--that's an important detail. So if there's a debut book that won't leave your system and you've been trying to get everyone you know to read it, then here's your chance to spread the wealth.
Interested? If so, here's how you can help make your favorite new UK published author of 2012, a star.
Curious to know some of the other winners of the last decade? Here they are...
- 1999 Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families
- 2000 Zadie Smith, White Teeth
- 2001 Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, graphic novel
- Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives biography
- David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgenstein's Poker, non-fiction
- Glen David Gold, Carter Beats The Devil, fiction
- Rachel Seiffert, The Dark Room, fiction
- 2002 Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
- Alexandra Fuller, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
- Hari Kunzru, The Impressionist
- Oliver Morton, Mapping Mars
- Sandra Newman, The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done
- 2003 Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind
- Monica Ali, Brick Lane
- DBC Pierre, Vernon God Little
- Paul Broks, Into the Silent Land
- Anna Funder, Stasiland
- 2004 Armand Marie Leroi, Mutants: On the Form, Varieties and Errors of Human Body
- Matthew Hollis, Ground Water (Bloodaxe)
- David Bezmozgis Natasha and Other Stories (Cape)
- Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (Bloomsbury)
- Rory Stewart The Places in Between, by (Picador)
- 2005 Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards
- Reza Aslan, No god but God
- Richard Benson, The Farm
- Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
- Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Sightseeing
- 2006 Yiyun Li, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
- Lorraine Adams, Harbor
- Clare Allan, Poppy Shakespeare
- Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men
- Carrie Tiffany, Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living
- 2007 Dinaw Mengestu, Children of the Revolution
- Tahmima Anam, A Golden Age
- Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City
- Rosemary Hill, God's Architect
- Catherine O'Flynn, What Was Lost
- 2008 Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century
- Mohammed Hanif, A Case of Exploding Mangoes
- Owen Matthews, Stalin's Children
- Ross Raisin, God's Own Country
- Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole
- 2009 Petina Gappah, An Elegy for Easterly
- Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal
- Samantha Harvey, The Wilderness
- Reif Larsen, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet
- Michael Peel, A Swamp Full of Dollars
- 2010 Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper
- Nadifa Mohamed, Black Mamba Boy
- Ned Beauman, Boxer, Beetle
- Maile Chapman, Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto
- Kathryn Schulz, In Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
- 2011 Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
- Stephen Kelman, Pigeon English
- Juan Pablo Villalobos, Down The Rabbit Hole
- Mirza Waheed, The Collaborator
- Amy Waldman, The Submission